About the authors

SEAN WALSH has been in the technology industry for more than 20 years. During that time, he progressed from programming in Microsoft languages and frameworks to becoming an early adopter of Java in the mid-1990s. Sean consulted for a large number of startups and enterprises in many verticals, particularly financial, energy, and retail. He has been the chief technology officer and co-founder of a successful medium-size consulting company in Manhattan, vice president of services for SOA Software, and the owner of a lucrative software consulting company since 1996.

After the sale of his last company and taking some time off, Sean decided that it was time for a rebirth and again began hands-on consulting in the energy industry, first using Java and Spring, but after seeing their limitations, embracing Akka and Scala. He has accumulated years of experience in building distributed applications by using the Lightbend open source stack, including the digital transformation of Weight Watchers.

Sean is now field CTO of Lightbend, helping Lightbend’s clients realize reactive architectures.

DUNCAN DEVORE is a principal systems engineer at Lightbend and has been a staunch advocate of Scala, Akka, and reactive applications for several years, producing one of the first reactive applications in production. He is also a committer on the original event-sourced project by Martin Krasser that became Akka persistence and maintains the Akka Persistence Mongo Journal.